May 30, 2013

Beverly Hills Cop (1984) - Blu-ray Disc

by Walter Chaw I used to watch Beverly
Hills Cop about once a week in regular rotation with other
movies I bootlegged during those first delirious go-rounds with the
VCR-connected-to-rented-VCR carousel. It was on an extended-play tape
with two other movies (Desert Hearts was one of the
others, Re-Animator the third; quite the
triple-feature!); back then, quantity beat the ever-loving shit out of
quality. (Bless Paramount, by the way, for always being too cheap to
encode their VHS tapes with Macrovision.) For me, Beverly
Hills Cop was, like its contemporary Ghostbusters,
the ne plus ultra of comedy--my eleven-year-old
self still a couple of years away from Monty Python--and the requisite
throwaway scene in a strip club was enough to be the centrefold in this
analog PLAYBOY that, huzzah, I didn't have to
hide between the mattress and bedspring. The picture had, truth be
told, everything a pre-pubescent boy could want in terms of violence
(but not freaky violence), sex (but not freaky sex), nobility (the
easy-to-understand kind), and plotting (ditto). The hero was an
African-American man I'd never seen on SNL (which was on too late for
me to catch) and had likewise never seen in 48Hrs..
He was small and not particularly powerful, but he was lithe and had a
quick wit and compelling improvisational skills, and he ably parlayed
his minority status in a few scenes that aren't the slightest bit
threatening. Eddie Murphy's Axel Foley is, in fact, not entirely unlike
cultural brother E.T.--the outsider hero with special abilities who,
mission accomplished, can slink off to wherever it is he came from.

That wherever it is
being Detroit, Motor City, where Foley is the po-po, jiving from
undercover in the back of a stolen cigarette truck while The
Pointer Sisters carve out their only hit on the back of the
top-grossing R-rated comedy of all-time. The comparison is apt, because
the poverty and decay of Detroit might as well have been Mars to me
(still: the best joke of RoboCop now is that its
vision of a destroyed, post-apocalyptic Detroit is sunnier than the
city's current reality), and Foley emerging from it to restore an
affluent, white, equally sci-fi community had an undeniably seductive
appeal to a kid--me--who was also a minority in a predominantly white
area who often wondered what the hell happened. The fish-out-of-water
humour is of the same species as "The Beverly Hillbillies", spiced up a
little--through the magic of casting and Murphy's temporary status as
racial spokesman--by a mild racial element. Compare the one, probably
ad-libbed line in Beverly Hills Cop about Axel's
race ("A black man, dressed like this...") with the barrage of racial
taboo-breaking in Walter Hill's brilliant 48Hrs. to
begin charting the legendarily-steep decline of Murphy as a
conversation worth having outside the tabloids.

After his
archetypal chief (Gilbert R. Hill) perfunctorily chews him out, Axel is
visited by a childhood pal who made good in Beverly Hills as a security
guard and has returned to Detroit, with a pocketful of pilfered bearer
bonds (German, because Germany is a good shorthand for "evil"), to
shoot some stick. Alas, said buddy (an unbelievably young, and hirsute,
James Russo) is executed for his transgression across social lines,
leaving Axel to drive his undesirable black ass to Hollywood and Vine
to show the soulless BHPD how a brother solves a murder. If nothing
else, Beverly Hills Cop comes full-circle from
stick-in-his-ass MISTER Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) teaching all the
loosey-goosey crackers how systems and edd-ication is the answer to
equality to loosey-goosey Axel Foley teaching all the
stick-in-their-ass crackers how to loosen up, objectify the bitches,
drink magnums, and nail some presumably-racist Aryans for smuggling
drugs into the country. Drugs--it's not said, but we're all thinking
it--that will most likely end up back in Detroit to further oppress
Axel's people. And by the way, there is no answer to equality. The
film's closest analog is probably the underestimated Demolition
Man, which has the balls to un-freeze a relic from an alien
society to deal with a social irritant--but doesn't have the balls to
re-freeze him the way that Beverly Hills Cop sends
Axel away once he's outlived his usefulness, a bag full of purloined
hotel robes his only recompense.

Six months earlier
in the same year as Beverly Hills Cop, Murphy stars
in his first flop, Best Defense, before embarking
on The Golden Child (which mocked Asian cultures
instead of white ones), Coming to America (which
doubled back to target African cultures), and various other projects
too sundry (Vampire in Brooklyn) and/or embarrassing
to detail at length. Despite his astoundingly rapid ascension of the
ranks into the American cultural pantheon on the backs of his short
stint on SNL and performances in 48Hrs. and Trading
Places, by Beverly Hills Cop he's already
showing fatigue, as what's genuinely edgy and disquieting about his
persona is steadily bleached-out into a far-easier-to-assimilate image
of the help, invited in for supper and then bed down in the barn. Good
boy. Who would've thought the erstwhile Reggie Hammond would spend his
dotage fucking himself (Norbit), doing the voice of
an animated donkey sidekick, and talking to animals and toddlers in
kiddie franchises? But already in Beverly Hills Cop,
there's a distinct feeling that Murphy represents all the marginalized
members of our society (recall the lisping gay caricature he essays to
earn an audience with chief baddie Maitland (Steven Berkoff)),
summarizing the main elements that marginalize them in amusing stand-up
routines and repackaging them in a socially-beneficial, cute,
even-tempered helper elf. Axel watches white strippers dance, but he
doesn't get the sex he gets in 48Hrs., nor is he
offered the tantalizing carrot of interracial sex as in Trading
Places. Just a couple years into his superstardom, he's
already been neutered for your protection.

Not helping matters
is that Axel's chief antagonists in Beverly Hills Cop
are a bumbling pair of Laurel & Hardy flatfoots, Taggert (John
Ashton) and Rosewood (Judge Reinhold, eternally Brad Hamilton). They're
the straight men to Axel's act, fooled by his antics and awestruck by
his resourceful street smarts until, in the end, they finally learn to
strut under the tutelage of their very own brother from another planet.
It's telling that director Martin Brest encouraged Ashton and Reinhold
to play their roles like an old married couple, as Beverly
Hills Cop is essentially Guess Who's Coming to
Dinner with a uniquely not-smart-but-clever screenplay that
likewise shies away from the real issues Eddie Murphy as Axel Foley
raises in favour of something perilously close to a minstrel show. When
Eddie does his trademark A-OK (i.e., "o-tay") hand gesture and
Buckwheat grin in Cop, it's not ironic and
self-knowing as it is in 48Hrs. or
borderline-devastating as it is in Trading Places,
but curiously un-ironic and not-self-knowing. Absolutely the most
capable person in the film, Axel gets no commendation, no woman, no
nothing except the satisfaction of avenging the death of a white friend
at the hands of white villains to the glorification of the white
policemen who are aided by him. He is, signs suggest, already the
nigger.

THE
BLU-RAY DISCBeverly Hills Cop
comes to Blu-ray
from Paramount in a nice 1.78:1, 1080p/AVC-encoded presentation that
avoids the smoothness of many catalogue releases and exhibits none of
the obvious lack of care afforded recently to 48Hrs..
It's not showcase material (nor is this necessarily the kind of movie
that lends itself to being showcased), but it's not bad, with better
interior shadow detail than I ever remember having seen. An environment
ripe for colour bleed and murkiness, the strip club, is, for example,
notably well-defined. There's (fine) grain throughout as befits a film
shot on film and exteriors pop in a way I doubt they have since the
first screenings on the first days. The attendant 5.1 DTS-HD MA track
is more disappointing, as most of the information is relegated to the
front channels. Although ultimately adequate, neither does the mix feel
as muscular as I remember it. Partly the product of
decades of stakes-raising fare, no doubt, but also that the soundtrack
lacks a lot of, well, muscle.

Brest contributes a
feature-length yakker that begins with a burst of enthusiasm that's
both charming irritating as he declares that he hasn't seen the film in
"150 years" and is "mesmerized" by the parade of opening credits.
Later, he'll apologize and say that his periodic lapses into silence
are because he's hypnotized by the dialogue; Brest probably did a lot
of uncredited work on the screenplay. I like an anecdote about how an
undercover cop they hired for security while shooting second-unit in
Detriot refused to go into certain neighbourhoods--and I like Brest's
memory for small moments that actually edify the experience of the
film. As disappointed as I am returning to Beverly Hills Cop
all these years later, I guess at heart I remain a fan, and these tales
out of school are still tales I wanted to hear. Herein, learn how they
retooled the film after Sylvester Stallone priced himself out of it and
how there was an awareness of race issues but that they were almost
unconsciously transmogrified into caste issues. I didn't love Brest
taking credit for some of Murphy's Murphy™ riff, but hey. I listened to
it without frustration the whole way through and that's saying
something.

Ported over with
Brest's commentary from
the Special Collector's Edition DVD, "Beverly Hills Cop:
The Phenomenon Begins" (30 mins., SD) is a 2002 retrospective making-of
in which the likes of producer Jerry Bruckheimer recount the myths and
half-truths surrounding the genesis of the film. Michael Eisner,
everyone seems to agree, was instrumental on the ground floor, which,
honestly, ain't that hard to believe. Credited writers Danilo Bach and
Daniel Petrie Jr. talk about original casting choices Mickey Rourke,
Clint Eastwood, and James Caan (and Brest offers in the yak-track that
much of what he imagined for the Detroit prologue patter came from Mean
Streets--further intimating that he had more than a custodial
interest in the shooting script)--but the rest of the time is spent
documenting the high volume of on-set improvisation. One speculates
that the combination of this spontaneity and an idolatry of Murphy's
ability to riff did the star no favours going forward. Stallone's
rewrites are discussed in passing, though the participants resist cheap
shots at Cobra, the film eventually spun from his
take on the material. By all accounts, Stallone comported himself with
absolute civility. A great piece in spite of the inevitable hagiography.

"A Glimpse Inside
the Acting Process" (9 mins., SD) has the core cast (Reinhold, Ashton,
Lisa Eilbacher, Ronny Cox, and Murphy, appearing via footage from the Dr.
Dolittle 2 junket) again discussing the familiar things and
Brest recalling his planned approach to working with Stallone and how
he saw the whole thing as a story of class struggle (like his Midnight
Run, come to think of it). Not as interesting, but not
terrible. "The Music of Beverly Hills Cop" (8
mins., SD) starts to slide off the rails as, unfortunately, for as
immensely popular as the soundtrack proved to be at the time, it blows Beverly
Hills Cop's aspirations towards immortality to shit. Nothing
pulls you out of something as quickly as Harold Faltermeyer (or Glenn
Frey)--and let me say this directly to music editor Bob Badami: don't
introduce The Third Man with "there's a movie
called The Third Man" unless you want to piss off
the only people who give a shit about your stupid Zither/Anton Karas
pretentious-ass reference in relation to motherfucking "Nasty Girl." An
interactive "Location Map" points out places where the movie was shot
on a map that, once clicked, pulls up interview clips (about 90 seconds
apiece) with location managers, while the moldy theatrical trailer (2
mins.) clarifies how bad the film surely looked on my VCR back in the
day despite its upgrade to HD. Funny to say, it made me more nostalgic
and sad than anything else. Needless to say, we've gotten better at
cutting trailers. Originally published: May 31,
2011.